So you’re working on some kind of webapp that needs some in-browser code editing functionality of some sort. You search google and discover that most folks are using editarea these days. You figure it must work to be so popular and decide to try it out.

Then as you start to use it, you realize it’s unmaintained, doesn’t work terribly well in Webkit browsers, doesn’t work at all in Internet Explorer 9, is poorly documented and hard to extend, expand, or fix. You’re frustrated.

But repeated web searches do not yield anything as functional, and you resign yourself to a half-working editor, or maybe even decide to write something from scratch.

I’ve been that person, and I was recently lucky enough, while searching for something completely unrelated, to stumble across CodeMirror a standards-compliant javascript-powered code editor that is well documented. It’s not as featureful as editarea, but if you add CodeMirror UI to the mix, you end up with a comparable featureset that actually works.

I’m not normally one for simply reposting links, but as I had so much trouble finding CodeMirror in the first place, I hope this post will either help others to find it, or at least increase CodeMirror’s page rank in search results.